Freedom House slams worrying decline in Turkish media freedom

By bne IntelliNews April 28, 2016

The deterioration in media freedom in Turkey is once again making global headlines. The Freedom House 2016 Report on press freedom argues that media freedom in Turkey is in a worrying decline, with the independent watchdog giving the country’s media a “not free” grade.

Turkey ranks 156th out of 199 countries around the world, and is among the countries that suffered the largest declines over 2015, along with Macedonia, Zimbabwe, Egypt, Yemen, France, Serbia, Burundi and Bangladesh.

Freedom House marked Turkey’s press freedom score for 2016 as 71 out of 100, with 100 being the worst. Turkey, which has been a candidate to join the EU since 1999, fell from “partly free” to “not free” in 2014.

The Freedom House report coincided with the latest report of Reporters Without Borders released last week, “2016 World Press Freedom Index”, which also placed Turkish media among the most restricted in the world, and ranked the country at 151 out of 180 countries, two points below the previous year.

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A Tactical Tech research:

INTRODUCTION

As technology becomes increasingly fundamental to the work of many human rights defenders (HRDs), a parallel expansion can be observed in the digital threats they face. Tactical Tech has been working in digital security training for human rights defenders for close to a decade, yet whilst the field has experienced rapid expansion in recent years, almost no research or comprehensive review has been carried out regarding the process and effectiveness of current training practices, nor regarding the challenges faced by participants in implementing learnings outside the training room. The two research papers summarised here represent an initial exploration of some if these issues with the intention that the findings will help inform and encourage future applied research projects, the design and testing of new training approaches, models, and curricula, as well as contributing to broader discussion within the digital security training community.

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